HEALTH secretary Alex Neil has vowed not to ask doctors to hit targets for the number of patients who die on the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway, after it emerged hospitals in England were being given financial incentives to do so....The Association for Palliative Medicine, which represents 1,000 doctors working in hospices and specialist hospital wards, says the average lifespan of a patient on the pathway is 29 hours, but that some patients taken off the pathway have lived for several months. It emerged yesterday that up to £30 million has been handed to NHS hospitals south of the Border in the past three years to achieve LCP goals.

Several hospitals confirmed they received extra funding for increasing the percentage of patients who died while on LCP.

It is possible to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep a terminally ill person alive. Economic pressures have to be recognized and dealt with in any health care system.

Decisions on end of life care have to be taken by the patient, the family and the doctors all together. Some people are determined to move heaven and earth to stay alive one more hour, others are happy to go as soon as nature takes them.

And for those who do not know - LCP is the withdrawal of food and/or liquid from a terminally ill patient in hospital.

I have known several elderly people who have chosen to no longer eat and take their medicines whilst living at home in order to stop delaying the inevitable. It may not be a comfortable thing to have to deal with for the famiy, and may even be regarded as suicide, but at least they died with dignity.